CodeSipper - Vancouver BC Website Design and Development

Having been self-employed all of my life I’m very much “at home” working from home. It does take a certain sort of psyche to be able to cope with it though. It’s very easy to drift into a disorganized and unproductive mess. Discipline is the key, you need to keep to a routine just as if you had jumped into your car and headed off down the highway. My routine goes something like this:

Up at 6am, fire up the kettle for a big brew up. I’m at my desk by 6:10 checking what’s been happening overnight with stock markets and general world news and sport for the first 20 minutes. I then work through from 6:30 until about 12:30 when I take in a light lunch for about 30 minutes. It is important to get up and move around away from your desk at regular intervals, sometimes I do overlook this and find my back is telling me it’s time to stretch the legs.

The beauty of working from home is that you can mix and match your day. If you have errands to run or jobs that need doing away from your desk you can usually fit these into your day at sometime. In fact I find it serves as a refresh of my mind to sometimes put the work down and do something completely different, particularly if you hit a road-block in your work. When you return, more often than not, you look at things differently and come up with solutions that were staring you in the face.

My day will generally finish around 5pm, although again you have the advantage of carrying on if you’re in the groove or knocking off early if the day has been difficult or you need to re-fresh. There’s an interesting article in Forbes Magazine about “The Perils of Working from Home” which makes for an interesting read.

One thing not to forget though is that you are the one at home, if your partner is out to work then there are certain things that are expected of you. These are generally the boring mundane household chores that you don’t like. Sometimes I’m good, sometimes I’m bad …. but I am still working on this one.

It’s true, really, yes me, in a school. Well it’s like a school but without the thick pink custard and bunsen burners. It’s called ‘Codecademy’, you join up online then take the courses at your own pace, it’s very interactive and simply laid out. I’ve started with the basic HTML courses and will then I’ll move onto the CSS section. HTML is like the bones or skeleton of a web site and the CSS can be looked at like the skin. It’s what makes it pretty and easy to look at.

This first week has been pretty good and I’m starting to be able to grasp some of the basics. They split the lessons down into quite small chunks so you can see your progress, there’s a little test at the end of each one to check if you’ve taken most of it in. If you get it wrong then little hints come up to help you – never had that when I was at school.

So far I’ve learnt how to set up an HTML page adding the head and the body, the head is where the title goes, this is the name you see on the tab of your web browser. The body of course is where all the content of your site goes, I did say that HTML was the skeleton.

Paragraphs go in the body and can be created by entering your text between paragraph tags like these Your text. All content in an HTML document has to be contained in between an opening and a closing tag.